Crystalline
by andrine
Summary: Sometimes, the embrace of a memory is just as strong. SquallRinoa.


**Author's Note**: Hi everyone! Well, some of you may have seen this before (it was posted on the Final Fantasy Online forums) but I promise it's been polished up and all new and shiny.

In summary, _Crystalline_ is a vignette from the view of a young sorceress. Unsure about herself and ready to be sealed in a containment lab, Rinoa contemplates on past, present, and future and the love song that links them all. Squall/Rinoa.

Thank you to everyone who reads/reviews!!! It means so much to me!****

**Crystalline**

_"Mirror, mirror, where's the crystal palace?"_

Rinoa Heartilly hated the winter.

There was something contained in it, epitomized by it, that seemed terrible. Hostile. As if the cold weather were sent from the sky strictly to plague human existence. Pestilence and disease, nothing. The cold was infinitely worse, if only because it was completely... unavoidable. Yes, that was it. No matter the layers of clothing, the artificial heating, the mugs of tea and hot chocolate, that wretched frost seeped through and bit at her bones. She could hide it or hide herself from it, as much as she fancied, but its very presence generated her disdain. Too... frozen.

Perhaps it was a generalization, but she fathomed that most people felt this way. After all, didn't everybody look forward to spring flowers and summer sun? There was nothing to winter but the dull, barren wasteland.

Much like this place. This god-forsaken place and these god-forsaken soldiers, in their silver and gray synthetic-environment suits. They were just men, doing their jobs and their duty -- not much different from everybody else in the world -- but something about them irritated her. She wished she could say that it was their harsh armor, or the weapons that they carried so casually, but it wasn't, really; she was rather used to weapons and armor, after... well, after everything that had happened.

It wasn't even so awful that she'd never seen their faces past a silhouette of eyelids and lashes behind a blue tech-screen visor. Rinoa could deal with anonymity.

What bothered her, what made her uneasy to no end, was their posture. The stiffness of their spines, like they were somehow unbreakable. It was almost as if she wasn't staring at men, but at things that _might_ be men, yet had steel rods keeping them upright. Esthar had the unique capability of projecting that image. So did her father, if you could call him that. But her father didn't treat her like a rabid stray, and that sort of made up for some of her uneasiness about him.

They were marching her, guiding her without touching her toward the red tower-esque building. _Too bad it isn't ivory_, Rinoa thought just a little too acridly.

Its red turrets jutted against the whitening sky, as real and bloody as her future. Too bad red was such a pretty color, she thought. Too bad red could be honorable, passionate... like the Ragnarok (_don't think about that_)... warm... like strong arms...

The wind blew sharply, and Rinoa curled her arms around herself in a pathetic attempt to block it out. She never dealt with coldness well, at least not physical coldness. There was a subtle scent that hung in the air - snow - and she could pick it out expertly. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the sky; it seemed swollen with the frozen crystals it held, ready to burst at any moment. She frowned a bit. If she was going to as much as die here, why didn't God see it fit to at least give her a spring day, warm weather, flowers in bloom?

Rinoa chided herself softly. Maybe she was being silly, to be so affected by weather or a season - seasons were, after all, a certain part of life that no mortal could change.

Mortal. Now there was a paradox, if she ever knew one. She wasn't exactly mortal anymore, was she? Her blood ran thick with power, her memories deep with years and ages that couldn't possibly be her own. Ever since that day (funny how she couldn't bring to mind the exact date) in Galbadia Garden, she was something more. Yet she found herself thinking, more and more, about minuscule things that didn't compare to the grander web she was caught in.

Her body was pulled this way and pushed that way by supernaturally strong forces. She was a sorceress now, whatever that meant, transformed from one sort of puppet to the next. Only this time Rinoa didn't know where the strings were to cut.

But her mind... that was free. It seemed she was the only one who knew this; who knew that a power as poisonous as she had drank still could not steal that one precious part of a person's brain. Free thought. Cognitive thought. So, stuck in this cage she didn't know anymore, with a familiar face but a stranger's hands, she could hide in that warm, dark womb of memory and emotion.

And here, in her little asylum, thoughts swirled and it was, to her surprise as well, foolish strands she chose to catch. Like the memories of one halfway-nonexistent night that seemed more 'could' than 'was,'' the exact color of a certain pair of eyes, a song long dead.

... A song.

_Eyes on me. _

_So there you are... _

It had been her mother's song -- the melody interwoven with the smell of taffeta and expensive perfume. Rinoa could not remember a time when she had not associated each and every one of the many versions with her childhood. A season when she was young and had known a perfect sort of love that could not exist in a more pure form.

The image of her beautiful mother, hair twisted up softly and lips painted crimson, almost unapproachable were it not for the open arms ready and inviting for a daughter's embrace, had faded over the years. She could not remember much of her mother's face anymore.

But she could remember the voice. Smooth as caramel, clear as... ice.

Her mother had not lived to be an old woman. It seemed her fate, too, was planned and plotted without personal input. She would be beautiful forever; would not ever exist beyond that red dress and coifed hair. And her daughter? She would not live to know her mother past the age of five years, save for in the recesses of an unreliable and frightening mind.

It had been December, and Rinoa could remember that clearly. December was supposed to be a month of fresh cookies and solstice presents, not of skidding cars and unfair circumstances.

The car was new, an early present from a man who desperately wanted to love, shined so well that when her mother held her up in strong arms Rinoa could see her own reflection in the slick surface. When her mother placed her in the passenger seat, buckled her up against the smooth leather, Rinoa had felt incredibly small in that large, large seat. It was a feeling that had not seemed to have left.

The whole damnable charade was supposed to be a simple trip to some fancy party or another. Husband (and father) was supposed to join them there - he was a busy man, after all. Military and all that. Very important. The engine started and Rinoa could feel the beginning of the heater's warmth creeping up her sweatered arms. Her mother was a headstrong woman, would not accept the services of a driver. She said it felt too much like being... out of control.

Deling was known for its picturesque change of seasons - red leaves falling, giving way to white snow. On that night it had been exceptional, so white the snow almost looked silver - like chaste falling stars reflecting in chocolate eyes. Her mother had begun to sing in that lullaby voice she reserved for an only daughter more precious than platinum. Rinoa had been so captivated by the heaven-sent lace and the velvet sky and the angel-tongued song. Maybe it was imagination, or delirium, but it was as if the voice had never been clearer, sweeter than it was that night.

_Whenever said my words _

_Wishing they would be heard... _

And the entire experience was so trancelike, such a dream, that neither of them had the chance to scream before the car slid, skidded, shook off the road.

_My last night here for you... _

It was some period of unmeasured time before Rinoa opened her eyes the slightest crack. Her neck hurt so badly. Outside it had begun to hail, beating mercilessly against the scratched enamel and glass. She turned her stiff neck the slightest bit, saw the blood and the pale forehead knelt against the wheel. Saw the eyes that were now shut.

_Darling, so there you are _

_With that look on your face _

Rinoa's throat closed, the sob nothing more than a whimper. It couldn't be real, and yet it inexplicably was. The snow did not seem like lace anymore. It wasn't chaste at all, but a hundred thousand razored icicles. Her eyes closed again before she could cry.

_I saw you smiling at me _

_Was it real or just my fantasy? _

Rinoa had learned many things that night. Had learned how fast, how quick an existence could be torn away. Had learned how cold flesh could grow. Had learned how slow a twisted neck took to heal. Had learned how even the youngest of minds could not blot out twenty minutes of a life measured in years.

She learned to fear the winter. But fear is not a solid emotion; it exists only in angry waves, so the fear crystallized into hate. And now Rinoa Heartilly, who had her mother's voice and her mother's name, hated the winter.

Sometimes, if she thought about it enough, it seemed her mother was always trapped, stuck on a one-way path that did not diverge. She had heard old stories, about singing in a bar and about the dream that inspired that one song, but all that belonged to someone else. Not her mother, but Julia Heartilly. Her mother was happy and loved her daughter so purely she could understand what love was. Yet the woman in the song was not happy. She was pleading for something unable to be had.

There was a melancholy note Rinoa did not hear until years later... until... now. Now, marching toward that red tower with her boots clicking against the frozen ground, she felt melancholy, too.

Maybe things did exist in circles and, in some eternal way, she became the lost lover lamenting. Maybe at the end of this day, after the snow had fallen and she was too faraway for icicles to pierce her heart, her mother would hold her again and she could tell the story of how parallel they ended up. It felt like she had lost a part of herself, so she was now disproportionately _Julia_ instead of _Rinoa_.

Yet her mother couldn't possibly be had where she was going... only a ghostly trace of that taffeta, that perfume, that voice.

Icicles. They did not, could not, feel. If they did, they would have felt pity at least, would not have taken everything from her. Left her with only scars, a poorly closed-over heart and a thin lateral line of tissue on the back of her neck that faded from angry red to dull brown.

She reached subconsciously, her hand creeping upward so that it could trace against the hard flesh. It felt so foreign, unreal - a result of something equally unreal. The scar had been the result of fire and ice, of burning car and freezing snow. Something unpleasant, borne of unmixable opposites. Her father, when she lay in the hospital, told her it would become pretty, akin to a beauty mark.

It had not.

There was an inherent ugliness to the splash across her neck; it was repulsive and wretched. It simply could not be beautiful, could not be like the one that _he_ bore...

_Squall_.

She found herself halfway smiling when she thought of him, although whether the gesture was a smile or a sad grimace was questionable. Yes, he had a scar as well, a thin diagonal line that ran fluidly across the bridge of his nose. But when he wore the pain of unhealed skin, it was not like hers. There was a pride, a nobility to it like it had come from something infinitely honorable.

He was like that - noble and proud in a subtle manner that did not reflect anything he felt. Distanced yet commanding admiration, like a revered God. It seemed to Rinoa that was the reason why he wore the scar so well; it was an affirmation that he was real and human, not crafted with marble skin and sapphire eyes. It split his perfection in a way that made him seem foreboding to everyone else, but to her it made him approachable. Just as wounded, just as scared, as she was.

That was what Squall Leonhart embodied -- the contradictions of a boy expected to be a man, a man expected to be a god. His world was filled with people who didn't really love but, rather, respected.

It was different with her, though, and he knew that as well as she did. It had begun the moment his eyes began to haunt her. Eyes the color of the sky at that time of day that is caught between the end of night and the beginning of the morning. Eyes that she could fall into and drown, unwilling to struggle or claw for solid ground.

They were different and alike, the two of them. When she was with him, she didn't feel that he was pulling her back into the reality everyone else lived, but sharing their own detached perception. Caught in a vision of him, the stars could fade but the world would remain full of grace. Rinoa was whole; Squall had somehow unwittingly found a way to return those parts of her dropped along the path.

She loved him.

She knew that, and did not have to ask how truly she felt it. That had never been the tangle, the issue, the problem. It wasn't a question of how she loved him, but how far that could take them both. What could a frightened, tentative love that had never been given the chance to grow properly do? What sort of a shield, what sort of a weapon, was that?

_Their_ love was real in _their_ world. A world spun in the sky, from shooting stars and the dark loveliness of space. But here, in this reality of assassination attempts and sorceress wars, it was wispy and not at all solid. When Rinoa tried to grasp it, hold onto it just to feel it, the feeling slipped through her fingers like water. Here, in this dead-cold landscape, things like mercenary tactics and adamantine gunblades were far more real.

Rinoa could often wonder, with varying degrees of complexity, how it was that she was attracted to such a rare and different creature as him. He had chosen a fate that was a polar mirror to hers; he was a soldier, a mercenary. This should have appalled her - the lack of ability to make decisions, the unwavering dedication to duty, the unquestioning nature. But inside, in another part the power could not touch, she knew that this was not true. Squall was a mercenary, and he was trained to kill... but she could not hate him for it. It had simply been a consequence of the hand he was dealt; he had never known anything else.

She had learned, too, that despite her rash conclusions a man like him had learned early on to question actions and emotions. Perhaps she had only thought him brainless because he reached different answers than she did. And then she wondered what his answers were... were they to the same questions she asked? Were they more right?

This was why she felt drawn to him, then. Because he fascinated her with his radically foreign thinking. It lured her to him with the pleasurable pain of his disregard and apathy, with the brief moments when she thought she saw a flicker of something in his eyes. How was it that you fell in love with someone who barely said a word?

He was as chilled as the climate, and it was one more paradoxical occurrence that she wanted nothing more than to kiss this wintry boy. How could he entrance her like this? Her, who could brush off the fire of Seifer Almasy's advances, and the silk of Irvine Kinneas' tongue. He had caught her in the net of his dark blizzard of a heart, pulled her from the womb of popular certainty into his world. But, most dizzying, he had managed to - without a word - convince her she did not want to leave. She wanted, in fact, to ignore all existence and stay there with him forever.

They all said that she had changed him... but she didn't really think so. Squall had not become something new, had not broken from chrysalis to butterfly simply because of her. Rinoa had fallen for him as he was - drawn to the faults, cracks, imperfections that made him so uniquely real and safe to her.

This attraction was so unlike what she was feeling now, prodded towards something she did not want: the memorial, containment, space once more.

_....snap!... snap!... snap! snap!... _

The cuffs shut around her wrists and ankles, closed by some part of the mechanized mess that had earlier lifted her up like a rag doll. Rinoa shut her eyes hard with this last affirmation that they were not willing to even touch her by the smallest bit. They stood behind the magic-screened plexiglass window, cloned shadows in white suits and silver uniforms.

Rinoa's sight blurred in and out, the drugs they had filled her system with already taking effect. Behind the glass, it did not even look as if the men were breathing. She forced out one puff of white breath to make sure she was breathing, even though it hurt her lungs to do so. Satisfied, she let her mind wander again.

Being sealed away seemed the noble thing to do, the course to take for the greater good of all. So why did it feel so wrong? She wanted to struggle, wanted out, wanted to run away... if she wasn't so damn tired.

Rinoa caught herself before she began to wonder what Squall would have done. She couldn't let herself think that way, it was dangerous and she'd never figure him out. That was part of why she loved him - the sleek mystery, the enigma he embodied.

Love. It seemed impossible, but it remained unfeigned and unsullied through all of this. He frightened her at times, but she saw now it was because he reminded her of things... warmth and safety... embrace and serenity... a melodic silence... a song.

_So let me come to you _

_Close as I wanted to be _

_Close enough for me _

_To feel your heart beating fast _

_And stay there as I whisper _

She could be afraid of him, timid and hesitant... but she found him beautiful nonetheless.

They were preparing to gas her now, the final step before sending her comatose shell drifting in space. She could smell the beginning of the sweet chemical, could taste it on her tongue. Rinoa licked her lips gently, her thoughts unable to stray from her sharp lover despite how her future loomed over her head only minutes away. Maybe it was... destiny... they were together. A perfect kismet, formed in the stars. Too perfect for this world. She smiled, and let herself think of what sort of smile Squall must have. Would that be her only regret, to have never seen him smile?

No. Rinoa did not have to regret. She knew that soft, gentle smile untainted by sarcasm or sneer because he had used it so little, like he had saved it just for her. She, Rinoa Heartilly, did not have to regret... she had never really seen him smile, but she knew it from somewhere. A memory superimposed with the sort of smile her mother had given her.

The past, Rinoa thought as she began to close her eyes and relax, could be a terrible thing. It clung like spider silk. But it, in some sickly way, could pose both as a gift and a curse. Like winter... or love.

_You will know that you are not dreaming…… _

_……I will know that you are no dreamer _

The epiphany struck her. He would not come for her, would not save her this time because he realized everything. Because she asked him not to, in her own way, and he listened to her. Because he saved her in a hundred-thousand ways more pristine than charging the ivory tower on a white horse. Because love was a suicidal sacrifice such as this.

The girl, her hair a river of ink over her shoulders, kept her eyes parted long enough to spare one glance out the window. It had begun to drop delicately carved ice flakes, dropping a virgin net across the world she could not belong in.

To Rinoa Heartilly, the snow, falling outside like crystal tears, appeared immeasurably beautiful.

_"I get a little warm in my heart_

_When I think of winter."_

- Tori Amos


End file.
